Abstract

One of our entrenched intuitions about the mental is that every person is authoritative with respect to the propositional contents and attitudes of his own current mind. First-person authority is characterized by the following asymmetry: it is logically necessary that, whenever one sincerely ascribes the presence, or absence, of a certain intentional state to one's present self, there is a legitimate presumption that one is correct; whereas it is not logically necessary that, whenever one honestly attributes the presence, or absence, of a certain intentional state to any other individual or to one's non-present self, or makes a claim about the non-mental features of the external world, there is a legitimate presumption that one is correct. ;The problem is how to explain first-person authority. Unless such an explanation is available, there will not be satisfactory reason for thinking that our own current intentional states, over which we allegedly reign with epistemic authority, and others' intentional states, over which we supposedly do not exercise similar authority, are the same sort of state. There is no possible way for friends of first-person authority to avert skepticism about other minds until they succeed in ensuring that this authority can be explained. ;My dissertation consists of two chapters. In Chapter One, I lay out the problem of explaining first-person authority and argue that all attempts to solve this problem to date have failed. This chapter is largely negative. It argues against all actually proposed explanations of first-person authority. In Chapter Two, I contend that any attempt to explain it is doomed to fail, because there is no such thing as first-person authority. This chapter is mainly positive. It argues for eliminativism about first-person authority. A condensed version of this last argument is contained in the final section of the first chapter